Adrien is an adolescent damaged by a difficult childhood, without a father. Over the course of psychotherapy as well as through football, a veritable object of desire, Adrian discovered the unconscious traces of his history, a « father », and his place as subject that arises from establishing social relations though his discourse.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 2, 377-384.
The author attempts to delineate the nature of the negative in the course of the building of the love object at adolescence. Resting on the concept of a negative narcissism revealing the alteration of the functional value of the object, numerous clinical examples are here described in order to illustrate such an object misery, i.e. situations in which the object love becomes significant of a reversal on oneself within hate and shame.
The love state that all of a sudden takes place in the course of some psychoanalytic cures at adolescence, particularly when severe food disorders are experienced, is a psychical event evidencing a narcissistic and libidinal rehandling of the object. It is the sign of a disentangling of an underlying melancholic position that should be assessed in such a way as to find out its psychical goals and transference implications. As the consequence of some kind of mourning from the primary object, it carries with it the hope that a new object may find its place within the ego.
On the one hand, institutions for adolescents accept all sorts of demands; on the other hand, the extension of delinquency has the effect of socializing crime. Consequently, the therapist may accept situations at the crossroads where the penal, the clinical and the social meet, as in the case of a young criminal we received. There is a jarring of usual clinical practice, as the practitioner must be able to cope with the possibility of recidivism. We give an account of the clinical perspective adopted in this case, one which emphasized fantasy rather than drives, and which seemed to us a more honest way of accepting our social responsibility.
Adolescence, 2013, 30, 4, 945-956.
Faced with issues of changes associated with adolescence, the adolescent subject is in the throes of what, in the object-relation, comes from a necessary loss. When separation as a process is not dialectizable, it keeps the subject in a position of submission, locking him within an enclosure. To open up a space for creativity where such lock-down has occurred is the aim of workshops conducted by artists in a day-hospital. Supports ensured by the artist carry out a « portage », understood as holding and handling, in the sense that the artist establishes an encounter using subject matter that he carries psychically and is receptive to the lines and sketches of the adolescent’s formations.